This blog describes Metatime in the Posthuman experience, drawn from Sir Isaac Newton's secret work on the future end of times, a tract in which he described Histories of Things to Come. His hidden papers on the occult were auctioned to two private buyers in 1936 at Sotheby's, but were not available for public research until the 1990s.

Thursday, November 27, 2014

For every generation, there is a window of opportunity to create what Chilean director Alejandro Jodorowsky's son Brontis called, "a dreamed life." This is the Beautiful Alternative, the path not followed, the epitome of achievement not attained due to failure, impediments, lack of resources or similar circumstances. In cinema, Jodorowsky's 1970s' adaptation of Frank Herbert's Dune (1965) is considered by director Richard Stanley as "the greatest movie never made." A 2013 documentary on the subject argues that, at a critical time in the 1970s, this film marked the dividing line between what really matters artistically and real world limitations. And the fact that this particular film was not made because of monetary problems, and the unwillingness of the studios to bring such a radical vision to popular audiences, changed Hollywood and the entertainment industry forever.
Jodorowsky's Dune was an artwork that should have been made at
any cost and it wasn't. This film - it would have been between twelve and twenty hours long - would have established a different
industrial cinematic model. Director Nicholas Winding Refn believes that had this version of Dune been completed, it would have set the epic standard instead of Star Warsand "the whole megabucks blockbusterstructure would have been altered." Alejandro Jodorowsky himself, reflecting on his unmade film, commented that money is shit. And for that shit, his film was not made.

It was not just the money that made Dune difficult. It was the threatening subject matter. Rather like Carl Jung with his Red Book, the combination of Herbert's message and Jodorowsky's surreal imagination scared people. The Atlanticremarked that the complex story made the book daunting to adapt: "Dune was like the anti-Star Wars, undoing everything Lucas's trilogy did to make sci-fi a friendly place." More precisely, Dune is the ultimate saga of our world of the past 70 years. Dune's spice - the universe's indispensable resource - is a thinly-veiled metaphor for our world's addiction to oil. The planet Dune is our Middle East in microcosm. Herbert's whole Dune series speculates in a vast way on the fraught connection between energy and modernization. Herbert embraced western theology, power and business, Middle Eastern religion, Asian philosophies, and global economies, lifestyles, politics and societies. Everything that is wrong with our world, and all its greatest potential, is in Dune. Not everyone can face a harsh appraisal of that reality, which Herbert presented in the long fate of the Atreides family.

Some may question the Chilean director's abilities, but perhaps Jodorowsky looked at Herbert's uncomfortable appraisal without wavering. And perhaps his surreal, radical and true vision of our world was another reason why the film was not made. But the film had a curious afterlife: the surreal radicalism trickled into other films. The documentary, Jodorowsky's Dune, maintains that the unmade film had a huge impact sci-fi, fantasy and noir genres of cinema. Its cultural footprint is perhaps not so deep much as one would expect in Lynch's version. But other directors knew of Jodorowsky's ideas and used them. Ridley Scott confirmed in an interview that because of his brush with making Dune, he agreed to make Alien and Blade Runner. The Verge:

the whole [of Jodorowsky's] team went on to do Alien. Alien might not
have happened if these people had not met in Paris under Jodorowsky. Dan
O’Bannon never would have suggested to Ridley Scott, "Hey, you need to
hire this guy H. R. Giger, his work is amazing." They never would have
brought on Foss, never would have brought on Moebius … [O]nce we had the storyboards and we really went through
them, then certain things popped out. "Look at this opening shot, that
sounds familiar from Contact," and "This scene looks a lot like Raiders," and so on and so forth.

[M]any of the visual ideas in the Dune storyboards turned up in several
other movies including Flash Gordon (1980), Raiders Of The Lost Ark
(1981), Contact (1997) and the Alien prequel Prometheus (2012). Some are
more persuasive than others but one fact is indisputable. When the
project collapsed and the creative team scattered, Dan O’Bannon wrote
the screenplay for a monster in space movie, took H. R. Giger, Jean Giraud
and Chris Foss with him as conceptual artists, and made Alien (1979),
the film that established Ridley Scott’s directorial reputation after
The Duellists (1977). Without Alien, Scott doesn’t direct Blade Runner
(1982) – perhaps the most influential film of the last 35 years – and so
films like The Matrix(1999) don’t get made.

Perhaps what is most intriguing about Jodorowsky's Dune is not what we do know about it, but what we don't. Beyond Herbert's book, beyond the Hollywood studios, beyond the film versions of Dune that were made, this unmade film gauges the cultural impact of something that - because of its time, place, people and circumstances - could not be accomplished. It could not be brought into being. The cultural footprint of Jodorowsky's Dune is the artistic legacy of something never created. That impact of the lost, the unattained and the missing has its own poignancy. How do you trace the value of an absence? How do you extrapolate beyond failure and defeat to the dreamed life? How do you measure the influence of the path not followed?

About Me

Welcome to my blog, dedicated to the aporia, anomie, mysteries, and nervous tensions of the turn of the Millennium. I'm a writer and academic, trained in the field of history. These are my histories of things that define the spirit of our times. This blog also goes beyond historians' visions of the past, and examines how metatime and time are perceived in other media and disciplines, between generations, and in high and pop culture.